5 Sitcom Episodes When It Was All Just A Dream
The “it was all just a dream!” episode can be a lazy comedy writer’s best pal. Why bother with all of that “story logic” and “continuity” when you can just write whatever you want with no consequences? Want to put the King of Queens gang into an episode of The Honeymooners? It’s all a dream! What if Gilligan was on trial in old-timey London? A dream! I won’t give away WandaVision if you haven’t seen it, but fond memories of sitcom dreams drive a lot of the action.
Call ‘em lazy if you want to — heck, I just did at the beginning of this story — but sitcom dream episodes can be a lot of fun. Don’t sleep on these five examples of dream work making the comedy team work…
The Dick Van Dyke Show
What a nightmare — Rob Petrie dreams that he’s lost both his thumbs and his sense of humor. It just gets weirder from there in “It May Look Like A Walnut,” an episode that TV Guide ranked at #13 on its 100 Best Episodes of All Time list. Carl Reiner, who based his script on The Twilight Zone and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, creates a genuinely surreal atmosphere. Is Rob dreaming or is Kolak, an alien who looks like Danny Thomas, actually after Buddy and Sally’s thumbs?
Community
Jeff can’t handle the idea of turning 40 so his subconscious dreams up an entire episode created in the style of 1980s Saturday morning staple G.I. Joe. “G.I. Jeff” works as a delirious homage to Gen X crappy cartoons, but the dream is satirical as well. Toymaker Hasbro was on board with that satire, much to the surprise of Dan Harmon. “I thought they’d have more problems than they did with the idea of Jeff Winger’s G.I. Joe character accidentally killing people,” marveled Harmon. “But they were cool with that!”
Frasier
A dream episode might be an easy way out for some sitcoms, but it was a slam dunk for Frasier, whose title character analyzes nocturnal fantasies for a living. The show’s writers didn’t take it easy this time out, having Dream Frasier analyze his homoerotic dreams about a flamboyant food critic while he’s still asleep. The episode throws in another dream where Frasier gets busy with Sigmund Freud for good measure. Spicy!
Saturday Night Live
Yeah, yeah, SNL isn’t a sitcom. But as detailed in the SNL50 documentary, Season 11: The Weird Year, writer Robert Smigel decided to play the dream card to explain away an entire failed season. Hey, it worked for Dallas, the nighttime soap opera that hit the reset button when it revealed that several episodes were simply a fantasy.
Lorne Michaels’ first year back producing SNL? “It was all a dream,” Madonna tells the world. “A horrible, horrible dream.” And just like that, the season of Randy Quaid and Robert Downey Jr. was blinked away as if it had never happened.
Newhart
It’s one thing to write off a season as a dream. But what about an entire series?
After Dick Loudon gets knocked on the head in his Vermont inn, he wakes up to discover that he’s still Bob Hartley, mild-mannered Chicago psychologist. What a dream, featuring a maid who’s an heiress, a dimwitted handyman and three mostly silent woodsmen. Eight entire seasons exploring an eccentric Vermont inn never happened at all — it was just the fever dream of a man who ate too much Japanese food before he went to bed. TV Guide called it the most unexpected moment in TV history.